When NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) lands near the western edge of the Nobile Crater at the Moon’s South Pole in 2023, it will map and explore the region’s surface as well as subsurface for water. It’s set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon-Heavy rocket for delivery to the Moon by Astrobotic’s Griffin lander under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.
A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a programmable fiber with digital capabilities that can sense, store, analyze, and gather activities after it’s woven into fabric. Yoel Fink, professor and principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics and a senior author on the study, says that these digital fibers not only enhance the possibilities of uncovering the context of hidden patterns in a human body, but cna also be used to monitor physical performance, medical inference, as well as help detect diseases at an early stage. Read more for additional pictures and information.
NASA is planning to send its first mobile robot rover to the Moon in late 2023 as part of the Artemis program in search of ice and other resources both on as well as below the lunar surface. VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) aims to help the agency map resources at the lunar South Pole that could one day be harvested for long-term human exploration at the Moon.
NASA is sending a golf cart-sized robot to the South Pole of the Moon for an up-close view of the location and concentration of water ice in the region and for the first time ever. It’s called “VIPER” (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) and is set to roam several miles using its four science instruments — including a 1-meter drill — to sample various soil environments, with a delivery to the lunar surface planned for December 2022. Read more for a video and additional information.
Photo credit: Stonehill Taylor
The newly opened TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, United States is housed in the former TWA Flight Center airline terminal that originally opened in 1962, designed by architect Eero Saarinen. This hotel added two buildings on either side of the existing headhouse and contain a total of 512 rooms between them.
Why get a glitzy custom paint job, when you can just cover your car in wood? That’s exactly what Bosnian auto enthusiast Momir Bojic, 71, made from over 50,000 separate pieces of oak. He spent more than 2-years covering the bodywork of a regular Beetle in thousands of oak tiles, each one of which required no fewer than 23 separate procedures. Plus, he also made all of the wooden fittings, including the steering wheel, gearstick, hubcaps, and radio, in his home workshop. Click here to view the first image in today’s viral picture gallery. Continue reading to see 10 game-changing pizza inventions.
Sure, laptops are slowly replacing desktops, but some computer users / mobile warriors alike just prefer the feel of a full-sized keyboard and mouse. These five weird and cool computer keyboards let them do just that, and in style. Continue reading to see them all.
After analyzing new data from ocean drilling, researchers say that a city-sized asteroid is “what snuffed out the dinosaurs and half of all other species on Earth 65 million years ago.” Continue reading for one more render and a video.
The KT extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, birdlike pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth, Imperial College added in its release.
[via NG]
